Pokemon Go creator John Hanke is coming to Disrupt SF 2016

It’s every founder’s dream: you launch a product, and by the next day it’s a worldwide phenomenon. But it’s never quite that simple. For most people, Pokemon Go came out of nowhere. Seemingly springing forth from the ether, it was a household name overnight.

But for John Hanke — CEO of Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go — it was another step in a journey that was years in the making.

We’re proud to announce that John Hanke will be joining us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 to tell us all about it. How it came together, what it was like to suddenly have the biggest mobile game in the world in your hands, and where it’s going from here.

(And speaking of Pokemon Go: I’ve put a good 170 miles of walking and an unreasonable number of hours into the game — so it should be a fun interview.)

Hanke started making his mark on the tech world long before Pokemon Go — from helping to build one of the world’s first massively multiplayer online games to founding Keyhole, the product that would eventually become Google Earth.

Hanke is the latest addition to what is already an absolutely insane lineup of speakers at Disrupt SF 2016 — a lineup so crazy that I’m having a hard time picking just a few names to drop here as examples. But: Steph Curry, Megan Smith, Mike Judge, Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman… seriously, you’ll want to be there.

Want to be there in person? You can find tickets to the event right over here. Can’t make it? We’ll have a live stream on our front page throughout all of Disrupt.